Foreword by Ashley Null
I GREW UP IN WESTERN KANSAS, amid horizon-wide fields of wheat and countless clusters of grazing cattle scattered across seemingly endless acres of slightly undulating plains. One of my most favorite things to have ever written is a contribution to a collection of essays entitled 150 Years of Kansas Beef. My chapter was “Cowboys, Cowtowns and Cattle Trails of Kansas.” Why did I explore something so far afield from my academic interest in Cranmer and the English Reformation? Frankly, I wanted to write something my family would read. In short, I think it is accurate to say that I grew up in rural America. Yet, in all my years in Kansas, I never saw a horse pushing a cart. Pulling, yes, but pushing? I never saw that happen, not even once. After all, a horse’s head is not really designed to efficiently push a cart, but its body is so effective at pulling that even after human society made the transition from work animals to machines, we still refer to the energy required to move things in units of “horsepower.” However, when it comes to Christianity, this inversion of horse and cart seems to happen all the time.
Let me explain. One of the most basic principles in Christianity to get straight is which comes first: the cart or the horse. Do we initiate and God’s responds? Or does God initiate and we respond? Do we take a step towards God and, consequently, he takes a step towards us? Or does God come to us, embrace us, hugging us tight with his love so that we find ourselves instinctively drawn to put our arms around him in return, receiving the fullness of that love which he is imparting to us?
Or, rather, do we try to do something in-between these two diametrically opposite approaches? Do we start with the horse first, but then switch to the cart? Are we saved by Christ’s gift on the cross, but expect afterwards to be sanctified by our own efforts? Is our will bound before salvation, but afterward it must choose to initiate godliness? Or worse, do we think that our choices after salvation earn God’s further blessings? In short, are we saved by grace, but sustained by our own sweat? Or do we keep the horse in front of the cart from the beginning of our Christian lives to its consummation in the age to come? Philippians 1:6 teaches us that God will complete the good work he has begun in us, and Philippians 2:13 goes ever further, telling us that our desire and power to choose God instead of sin is actually his work in us. In short, do we long for God to lead us, or do we expect, or at least hope, that he will get behind what we are already doing and push us along our own way?
Of course, we are not the first generation of Christians to put the cart before the horse in matters of faith. These essential questions were the same ones which the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers were asking of their church and of themselves. Like Martin Luther before him, Thomas Cranmer found the definitive answers in Scripture, namely, the grace and gratitude theology outlined by Saint Paul in his Epistles: “not I, but Christ”; “not by my works, but by his promised gift of faith”; “not just for my salvation only, but for my salvation, sanctification and glorification”; in short, “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”
However, it was one thing for Cranmer to establish how the English church defined the true Gospel in the Articles of Religion (1553). It was quite another to insert justification and sanctification by grace alone through faith alone into the daily rhythms of English life, let alone to make it the heartbeat of Christian discipleship within every English believer. For these enormous tasks, Cranmer relied on the church’s liturgy. As his first step, he used the Sunday morning service, initially still in Latin, as an opportunity to preach the Reformation’s biblical message through the English sermons in the newly mandated Book of Homilies (1547). After having established the theological content for corporate prayer, Cranmer then devised two successive prayer books in English for divine service: daily, weekly, and on special occasions (1549 and 1552). He trusted that regular biblical preaching would help the English people understand their prayers, but he also expected that the liturgy’s scriptural readings and prayers would deepen their understanding of the faith and inflame their hearts with more love for God and his Gospel.
Clearly, Cranmer saw liturgy as an essential means for him to shape the piety of the nation in a new, more authentically ancient direction. Hence, determining the rationale for his editorial decisions is absolutely crucial not only for correctly interpreting his prayer books in their contemporary context but also for accurately describing how Cranmer understood mission to the people of his era. Yet, arriving at a satisfactory answer is not a straightforward matter. To borrow a common sixteenth-century humanist analogy, Cranmer was a very busy bee indeed who gathered pollen from a vast garden of liturgical flowers. Ever since, scholars have spent much effort in trying to distinguish the various flavors within the resultant liturgical honey and to promote as the most important that strain which tasted best to them.
Zac Hicks is to be commended for his close reading of Cranmer’s writings, which has permitted him to provide a convincing account. In the midst of all the other influences and sources for Cranmer’s liturgical work, Hicks marshals much evidence to show that the Reformation’s recovery of Paul’s message—“not I, but Christ”—was Cranmer’s plumb line in shaping his liturgical legacy for the Anglican Communion. Hicks confirms the fact, so often overlooked, that Cranmer designed the Book of Homilies, the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion to be a three-stringed cord which strongly proclaims the Gospel message: Christ is the horse which pulls the cart of our Christian salvation and discipleship. May he enable us to recover this abiding truth in our era as well!